Wednesday, September 25, 2013

What is a poem and not a poem? I'd say life as it unfolds and furls. I've been absent from posting of late. What has corresponded withthis time is a non-working computer. Well, it's now working andlogging in poetry has returned with it. I just posted a poem on my blog site, Contemplative Fire, only to realize it was a poem from the Meander prompt from back in July:It's called Laid Open ~ http://wp.me/pWMwh-hW

Please take a read, if you wish and perhaps some other prompts

will come through, bleed through, show up into the current flows. Nice to be back,Janice

Round nasturtiums glutted on soil so rich each leaf is as
big as my palm

Conveying a sentiment and invitation, I utter
and utter…

We try the attemptless, matchless activity of visualizing
Life

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to
him or her who shall
be complete

And arrive at plant and animal snaked two and four legged
creatures, winged

Because that is who we are, and that is wonderful

The earth remains
jagged and broken only to him or her who remains
jagged and broken.

But the Earth, capital E, is so much huger than this, on
such a different scale,

I swear there is no greatness or power that
does not emulate those
of the earth,

immortal on the scale of billions of years

There can be no theory of any account unless
it corroborate the
theory of the earth,

beyond our own droplet of consciousness momentarily

raised from this river of Life.

No politics,
song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account,
unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth,
Unless it face the exactness, vitality, impartiality, rectitude of
the earth.

She/It will persevere after the cleansing waters released by
her

I swear I begin
to see love with sweeter spasms than that which
responds love,

to detoxify the current poisons have washed away our
buildings, and—sadly—our grandchildren. She-It will persist and thrive beyond
our reckoning, though our form of worship and praise has been in places
inadequate to the beautiful offerings life has made with us,

It is that which
contains itself, which never invites and never refuses.

compañera praisesongs momentarily raised, unfurling, then
composting, each species, some untimely quenched by the poisonmaker greed

Of a culture and time too late coming clear to the
incompleteness of our vision and the scale of our folly.

All merges toward the presentation of the
unspoken meanings of the earth,

But a longer faith breathes me, knowing the freshness of
time, of She-It-Earth, four billion years young.

Say on, sayers!
sing on, singers!
Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth!
Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost,
It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use,
…You shall be fully glorified in them.

So nimble, lithe, creative.

Of the
interminable sisters,
Of the ceaseless cotillions of sisters,
Of the centripetal and centrifugal sisters, the elder and younger sisters,
The beautiful sister we know dances on…

Able to hibernate for 100 million years of rebirth. Able to
boil oceans to get a bath.

Some lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Rolling Earth”, (available here:
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/wwhitman/bl-ww-rollingearth.htm ) which I first or at least re-encountered this week,
September 2013

Thursday, September 12, 2013

an illustration by David Catrow for a children's book called Plantzilla.

we all hate GMOs. but it's ok to crossbreed poems (hand-bred GMPs? - More like Mendel, less like Monsanto): find two poems you already have written, (or write two separate ones), (or find two written by others), each of which has a plant or image from nature in it, and interbreed them: post the composite.

tags: plantzilla, epic-earth, poem, <poet's moniker>

An ongoing series of earth-related prompts as part of an Imunuri
experiment to dwell repeatedly on a theme and its riffs, and/or the
possible poetry challenge, bit by bit, of producing an epic or body of
poems...

”I
get it!" He shouts. "Everything is dissolving and
coming apart...becoming a part of...becoming the whole!”

His
hands absorbing knowledge from the sweet smelling mix.

The
farmer is stunned.

Then
it seizes her :

The
Sermon On The Pile

+++“Friends
... What you see here is NOT topsoil! Impossible! /// Hear me
Dear Ones! /// When those precious top inches of centuries old
fecundity are removed / that complexity has truly evaporated ///
Sisters and Brothers! / Nothing can replace it /

Hear
me now!/// In the nameless name of the source / Of that which we
erode and that which we preserve / We do not make the topsoil! / All
we can do is feed / protect it //

This!
// Our truest Wealth!

So
I say unto you

Give
yourselves to the ordinary compost pile / Tend it well / This sacred
culture /// Feel the revelation // YES! / The biotruth
// Not available in digital form /// Eternally more complex than
your latest computing device /// OH !! /// Forgive us the
arrogance that would posit the World Wide Web as superior alternative
to the breathing Web of Wisdom encoded in this heaving pile ///
YEAH!// This living compost /// Spread it open handed on the
ailing soil /// Lay your salt belly down on it's medicine! /// Commit
it's scent to memory /// Sanctify it /// This Holy tributary /
This taste of that most fundamental Darkness /// Precursor to
all Light /// The absence that speaks of an all encompassing embrace
//Of
verity // Of consolation /// Hallelujah !" +++